IT HAS become one of the mantras of our life together: “You can’t go anywhere in this country,” my wife and I say to each other whenever we’re stuck in a traffic jam.

Unfortunately we have found ourselves repeating the phrase more often these days as congestion grows worse, the delays more frequent, the tailbacks longer, the frustration deeper.

Part of the problem is that there are more cars on the roads because of greater affluence and the dramatic rise in the population fuelled by mass immigration.

But the problem of congestion is hardly helped by the attitude of the authorities, who sometimes seem to revel in causing mass inconvenience to the travelling public. The roads and railways now appear to be dogged by an institutional enthusiasm for imposing lengthy closures and excessive stoppages after all kinds of incidents.

There was a classic example this week on the M25, Britain’s busiest motorway, nicknamed “the country’s largest car park”. In an episode both ridiculous and dangerous a man decided to cycle along several miles of the hard shoulder near the junction with the M3, claiming that he thought this was legal because he had been guided on to this route by a satellite app on his mobile phone. Eventually Surrey police stopped the errant cyclist, who was given a £50 fine, but not before they had deliberately reduced this section of the road to paralysis by slowing the traffic.

In effect one irresponsible idiot had been able to bring motoring misery for thousands at the peak of rush-hour trying to get to work or to an airport. This is becoming an all too frequent occurrence because of officialdom’s eagerness to shut down networks.

Last November a stretch of the M42 in the West Midlands was closed for an astonishing 24 hours when the police became involved in a stand-off with a mentally ill man who was threatening to leap from a bridge.

On the same day a section of the M5 in Gloucestershire was closed for eight hours after a fatal accident, even though the vehicle was forming no obstruction, having left the carriageway and slid into a ditch. “I really do think the police are complacent in this respect. The system of blatantly shutting down all the carriageways of a major motorway is quite honestly unacceptable,” said one motorist.

What angers much of the public is the lack of any sense of proportion. So in August 2008 preposterous Fathers-for-Justice campaigner Geoffrey Hibbert prompted the closure of part of the M25 for two hours by standing on a gantry in a Batman costume. Tailbacks were more than 15 miles long.

But should any notice have been paid at all to this self-indulgent protest? It is the same story on the railways. In July last year the main railway line between London and Norwich was shut for seven-and-a-half hours simply because a deranged fool had clambered up on the roof at Ipswich station.

What angers much of the public is the lack of any sense of proportion

In true modern style the police and emergency services justify all this immobilisation by reference to the need to protect life and the requirement to gather evidence. That’s all very well but too often there seems to be a gross overreaction, certainly compared with other developed nations such as France and the USA where the emphasis is on getting the traffic moving.

The authorities might trumpet safety as a priority but their devotion to closures can have seriously negative consequences for the public, not just in lost business, wrecked holiday plans and work setbacks but also in damage to health from stress or missed hospital appointments.

After an appalling case of gridlock in August 2010, when a long section of the M6 in Lancashire was closed by the police as a result of a man threatening to leap from a bridge, one angry Lancastrian wrote: “My friend’s dad was trying to get to Preston hospital for his chemotherapy and radiotherapy. When he arrived he was told he was too late to start the treatment. He also missed his medication and was in pain by the time he got there.”

There has to be a suspicion the police and other officials enjoy exercising their power and throwing their weight around, holding the public to ransom in the name of safety. Yet that concern for safety would be more convincing if the police did not have such a disturbing record on road deaths themselves. In 2011/12 they were involved in 18 road fatalities and 26 the previous year, two of them caused when a police car hit a pair of pedestrians in Luton standing on the pavement.

The police of course have a difficult job but the death toll puts into perspective some of their pious language about the priority of protecting life. There are practical steps that could be taken to lessen these nightmarish closures. One might be to use a combination of stun guns and blown-up mattresses to deal with the clowns or tragic individuals with fantasies of death plunges. Another would be to improve traffic management on motorways through contraflows. This could be done by the use of gates in the central reservation barrier so traffic can be fed into the other carriageway and does not have to come to a complete halt.

The most effective move would be a change in the attitude of the authorities so that the needs of the public are properly considered instead of being treated with disdain.